A halo to Hampden District Attorney William Bennett for clearing out the pipeline of marijuana possession cases after the passage in November of a public referendum that made possession of an ounce or less of weed punishable with a civil fine. "I'm going to act as if the law were in effect now," said Bennett, who had opposed the referendum. Despite our great reservations about Bennett, beginning with his decision to break the promise he made to serve only two terms as DA when he campaigned for the seat vacated by disgraced former DA Matty Ryan in 1990—Bennett appears now to be a permanent fixture in the Hampden County Hall of Justice—we applaud him for capitulating on this occasion to the will of the voters.
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Gov. Deval Patrick is a disappointment. While we understand that 2008 was a tough year all round, Patrick earned a set of horns by showing voters repeatedly that he isn't the reformer he professed to be. And he's not much of a progressive. He is a Clinton Democrat, which is to say a Republican Lite. With economic gloom on the near horizon when he started the year, Patrick did nothing to challenge the status quo, but rather accepted and perpetuated a free market philosophy that views regulation as a hindrance. His decision to pursue casino gambling as his first major economic development initiative—a plan overwhelmingly rejected whenever it's come up before— suggests that he'd found his true calling before he became governor, when he was still earning millions as a corporate lawyer
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Horns to the Northampton Board of Health for the infamous Hookah Bar fiasco, with a special shoutout to Xanthi Scrimgeour, a former member of the BOH and the city's current Health Agent, for vilifying the entrepreneurs who asked for—and were initially granted—a conditional exemption from the city's 2004 smoke-free workplace law. The exemption came with the condition that the owners meet certain stringent requirements regarding signage and ventilation; said the BOH's Dr. Jay Fleitman, "The restrictions that we put on them were really rather draconian."
Though the owners met all the requirements, the BOH ultimately voted against amending city law to allow the hookah bar to open. Rather than account for the BOH's missteps in the matter, Scrimgeour attacked the entrepreneurs: "They know it's a tricky situation, having applied for and been denied to open businesses like this in other cities and towns." In point of fact, the owners had not applied for nor been denied permits anywhere but Northampton
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A halo to Suzanne K. Condon, director of the Bureau of Environmental Health for the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, and Jan Sullivan of MDPH's Community Assessment Program, for setting the record straight and warning the City of Northampton against trumpeting a 2008 MDPH study as evidence that the city's landfill poses no threat to public health. Northampton Mayor Clare Higgins, as well as the editorial page of the Daily Hampshire Gazette, had publicly cheered the MDPH study of available health statistics for neighborhoods near the municipal landfill, saying it proved the landfill was, in the words of the Gazette, "not responsible for any health problems, including cancer, among the city residents."
According to Condon, the study did not reach such a conclusion. In fact, she said—given that cancer, for example, is unlikely to show up in reported statistics "until 20 to 40 years after an exposure"— the MDPH study has almost no value in determining whether the landfill is a threat to public health today. "People who get cancer today were likely exposed [to a carcinogen] in the 1960s," Condon told the Advocate, adding that the MDPH study is of little value in weighing the risks of Northampton's proposal to expand the landfill over the Barnes Aquifer. "If you want to expand a landfill, you need to ask the right questions," she said. "Is the landfill causing health problems today, and will it cause health problems if it's expanded? Our study didn't answer those questions."
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State Sen. Stan Rosenberg is a tough one to pin down. After distinguishing himself as a consummate behind-the-scenes player when he helped to defeat an amendment last year seeking to ban gay marriage, Rosenberg found himself in the uncomfortable position of catching the flak for Gov. Deval Patrick's effort to legalize casino gambling in the Bay State. At the request of Senate President Therese Murray, Rosenberg headed the Senate's study of casino gaming—a role that he tried to play with impartiality but that, given Murray's full support of Patrick's gambling gambit, made Rosenberg look like a hired gun for the casino industry. For his attempt to legitimize the casino initiative, pretending that a bad plan soundly rejected in the 1990s was suddenly redeemable and, in fact, inevitable, Stan wins himself a set of horns to go with his Caesar's Palace playing cards.
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Greenfield Mayor Christine Forgey gets a set of horns for her heavyhanded efforts to bypass the Wetlands Protection Act in order to clear the way for the development of land off the French King Highway by a yet-undisclosed big box retailer. To pack the Conservation Commission with people who share her desire to bring Wal-Mart or some other "superstore" to Greenfield, Forgey ousted Conservation Commission Chairman Steve Walk, who'd served on the ConsComm for 16 years. That Forgey dumped the most experienced and environmentally knowledgeable person on the Commission right in the middle of one of the biggest environmental cases in the town's history shows not only her utter disregard for protecting the town's environment, but her willingness to subvert what should be a fair process to serve her own very shortsighted agenda
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An unexpected halo goes to Northampton City Councilor Bob Reckman. Between getting elected in the fall of '07 and taking office as the Ward 3 city councilor in early 2008, Reckman got into hot water for sending sitting city councilors an email that some residents thought amounted to a breach of the Open Meeting Law. He was vindicated only because he had not yet taken office when he sent the email. The District Attorney's office warned him that such a communication would have been a violation if he'd been in office when he sent it.
Despite the shaky start, Reckman took to office like a fish to water. He's been a strong advocate for public forums and disseminating information through the Web-savvy Ward 3 Neighborhood Association, and he's a member of the forum that brought the Notre Dame urban planning charrette to Northampton this fall. He worked hard, if not entirely successfully, to make the event a uniting rather than a polarizing one. Perhaps most importantly, though, he's been working hard charting the anatomy of Northampton government and trying to apply some order to the chaos. During the year, the Best Practices committee, made up of officials and private citizens, engaged city officials and the public in trying to understand what the status quo of city government procedures was, and also to offer suggestions for aspiring to a more transparent, engaged government.
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Last year, multinational Hilton Hotels' plan to build an ugly hotel in downtown Northampton was approved by the Planning Board sight unseen. When the public caught wind of it, it was too late. The city argued that Hilton had already made an investment that needed to be protected.
This spring, the proposed "village" on Hospital Hill was turned into a factory town when Northampton Mayor Clare Higgins' Citizens Advisory Committee approved local military contractor Kollmorgen to relocate to the site, vacating their factory on King Street. Again Northampton taxpayers had no say in the matter.
Meanwhile, Northampton continued to pursue a planned expansion of its municipal landfill without fairly addressing the concerns not only of Northampton residents whose properties are near the landfill, but of residents throughout the Valley who worry about the impact the landfill will have on the Barnes Aquifer, upon which the expanded landfill would be partially built.
The common thread between all this questionable development is the ostensibly progressive Mayor Clare Higgins, who has turned out to be little more than a hack. But, hey, now she's a hack with a nice set of horns.
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The Northampton Planning Board opposed Hospital Hill developer MassDevelopment when the developer asked for review of its actions to be private and outside the public eye. Vice-chair of the Board George Kohout expressed his and his colleagues' sense of exclusion from the planning process on the site of the former State Hospital, and he managed to negotiate terms with the mayor over final design approval. The Board has heard the strong public pushback from its premature approval of the hotel, and it appears eager to take on the mayor's other development plans less casually. We hope so, but we aren't prepared to elevate the Northampton Planning Board any higher than Purgatory.
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The three-piece suits that appear in Northampton every time there's a meeting about what to do with Hospital Hill are reminiscent of Mr. Dark in Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes. They come to town selling dreams and easy solutions, and in return they're given everything they want. Public land becomes private, and with $22 million in taxpayer dollars, MassDevelopment is able to pay teams of pinstriped VPs to drive across the state and attend our local meetings, where they lobby for less public scrutiny over their actions, plot and plan with city government behind closed doors, and ignore local criticism when it's shoveled at them. Their suits may be too warm for where they're headed, but we picked out a special set of horns that will look great with pinstripes.
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Halos to Notre Dame Urban Design Team: graduate students Kalinda Brown, Dan Degreve, Josh Eckert, Scott Ford, Aaron Helfand and Crystal Olin, and professor Phillip Bess. This fall, these unwelcome guests became the life of the party.
First, Northampton Planner Wayne Feiden said he'd consider inviting them on the city's dime, maybe, and only if they confined their studies to a select few locations. Eventually the city turned them down outright, saying it was investigating other, similar public planning forums it thought offered better value.
But a local ad hoc committee with local financial support invited the team instead, and for a week in September, they set up shop on Main Street in the A.P.E. Gallery. The result of their work, presented on December 13 at the high school auditorium, included bold new visions for locations the city had begged them to avert their eyes from: Hospital Hill and King Street.
Instead of car dealerships, gas stations and fast food prairie land, they saw a possibility for neighborhoods. Instead of the build-by-numbers development offered by the mayor, they offered a place that could sustain a community, coffee shop, community center and memorial to Hospital Hill's history.
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A halo to the late great George Carlin: Shit, Piss, Fuck, Cunt, CockSucker, MotherFucker and Tits.
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Horns to Larry Shaffer, Town Manager of Amherst. Amherst's resident Grinch almost didn't let Extravaganja happen this year as it typically does on the Amherst Common in spring. Organizer Terry Franklin has always encountered some resistance, but this year the Town Manager got creative. First he tried overcharging its sponsor, grassroots political organization Cannabis Reform Coalition, for trash removal (someone forgot to deduct the weight of the dump truck from the final tally), and then he wanted to charge them for police protection, a policy decision that was not his to make. In the end the event went on as usual, but we can only guess what Shaffer's got up his sleeve this year.
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A halo to the folks in rock band Heart, who got annoyed at the GOP's use of "Barracuda" for "Sarahcuda." Turned out they couldn't stop it, so instead they donated the royalty money to Obama.
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A set of horns to whatever numskull decided to remake the untouchable classic sci-fi film The Day the Earth Stood Still.
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Three cheers and a pair of halos to Springfield city councilors Pat Markey and Bruce Stebbins for succeeding in getting a city ethics ordinance passed despite foot-dragging by a number of fellow councilors who apparently don't think the public that elects them and pays them has a right to know if they bring any conflicts of interest with them into the Council chambers. (The ordinance also established long-overdue rules for lobbyists.)
Voters would do well to remember which councilors resisted the ordinance—like Bill Foley, who managed to weaken the original language through amendments, and Kateri Walsh, who cast the sole vote against the final ordinance. (We'll give a pass this time to Jimmy Ferrera, who initially met the proposal with much kicking and screaming, but by the end had come around so dramatically in support that you would have thought the ordinance was his baby in the first place.)
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It's tempting to say the horn-deserving Springfield Towing Alliance was a problem from the moment it first won the city's towing contract. But in fact, the group's bad behavior reaches back even further, according to a review committee report that said the STA repeatedly ignored bid rules by enlisting political pals to lobby the committee on its behalf. A public record trail shows STA's almost pathological inability to adhere to the terms of the contract, despite City Hall's offering it numerous (too numerous) opportunities to get in compliance—making insinuations that racism prompted the city to finally cancel the contract especially cheap.
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Residents of Holyoke's Springdale neighborhood have a tough fight ahead of them as they try to stop a trash transfer station proposed for the area. Lucky for them, they have in their corner their dedicated representative on the City Council, Diosdado Lopez, and the grassroots Holyoke Organized to Protect the Environment, or HOPE, who are fighting to make sure the voice of this largely poor, largely Spanish-speaking community is heard.
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Granted, we wouldn't relish the idea of having Amherst blogger-provocateur Larry Kelley (onlyintherepublicofamherst.blogspot.com) lurking around our fence, snapping shots as we yank dandelions from the garden. But that doesn't mean that Kelley wasn't well within his rights to raise questions, and do some investigative reporting, about how Select Board member Anne Awad planned to represent the town now that she was selling her Amherst home and moving to South Hadley. Awad and her sympathizers branded Kelley's reporting "harassment," obscuring the very legitimate issue he raised.
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Four years ago it was the dreaded liberal; this election season, the GOP cynically, sneeringly—and unsuccessfully—offered up the community organizer as its prime object of ridicule. While Sarah P. heads back north to organize her closet, we offer halos to the local community organizers—Arise for Social Justice, the Alliance to Develop Power, the Pioneer Valley Project, Neighbor to Neighbor, to name just a few—who make the Valley a better place.
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Springfield City Councilor Tim Rooke continues to demonstrate to his more lackluster colleagues what they're supposed to be doing on the Council, like pushing for accountability even on politically touchy issues (such as the city towing contract) and doing the tough work of trying to fix the city's rocky finances. Rooke has won himself some enemies along the way; he also wins himself a halo.
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Spirited electioneering is one thing, but this fall's race for the 11th Hampden state rep seat between incumbent Ben Swan and challengers Chelan Brown and Lorenzo Gaines sped right past spirited and into the cesspool. Horns for the "anonymous" mudslingers—most visible at MassLive's Springfield forum—who skipped over the real issues facing the district and reduced the important race into a series of seedy personal attacks.
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Halos to the many activists—including, locally, the Pioneer Valley Breastfeeding Task Force—whose hard work is finally paying off with the creation of the Mothers' Milk Bank of New England. The bank, based in Newton, provides donated breast milk to preemies and sick babies, for whom breast milk can be a lifesaver.
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In the five years since his agency bought the Mason Square library, Springfield Urban League Henry Thomas has largely dodged questions about the damage that secretive and unjust deal has done to the neighborhood, other than to insist that he won't step aside and give the library back to the community. This year, thanks to the Springfield Library Foundation, we found out why: a hush-hush agreement reached at the time of the sale ensured that the Urban League could never sell the building for profit. Horns to Thomas for keeping that secret at the expense of the community he's supposed to serve—and for tucking a $500 check into Mayor Domenic Sarno's campaign war chest as Sarno was facing mounting pressure to take the building back by eminent domain.
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Springfield activist Sheila McElwaine earns a halo for her hard work to promote her city's "River Walk"—the rail trail that runs along the Connecticut—and to persuade would-be strollers and bikers to speak up to improve the trail, which has suffered from the perception that it's not safe. (She's been joined in her efforts by a number of volunteers, interested bloggers like Bill Dusty and Heather Brandon, and institutions like Health New England and the Pioneer Valley Planning Commission.)
And on the subject of rail trails, why, oh, why can't the Department of Environmental Management do a better job maintaining the Norwottuck Rail Trail (or, as one friend of the Advocate put it, "nail trail")? "It's pretty much a trail only a chiropractor or an oral surgeon could love," moaned our frustrated pal, pointing to the root-ruptured path and the glass-embedded asphalt.
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Shame on the fearmongers (among them, the Massachusetts district attorneys and local law enforcement types like Holyoke Police Chief Anthony Scott) who used their publicly financed positions to try (unsuccessfully) to scare voters away from supporting the highly sensible marijuana reform on last fall's ballot. Dudes, mellow out.
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A halo to Springfield attorney Eugene Berman and the Western Massachusetts Foreclosure Hotline, a team of lawyers specially trained in the ins and outs of bankruptcy law to answer SOSes from people whose houses are on the Grim Repo list. We all know what Dickens thought of lawyers, but this squad puts the wizened creeps in Bleak House to shame. If your lender is Scrooging you, call the hotline at (413) 322-7404 for help at low cost or no cost.
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Horns to Ludlow state Rep. Tommy Petrolati for bullying his way into the question of where a new state data center in Springfield should be sited. In his determination to stick the center at STCC's technology park, Petrolati is thumbing his nose at the long list of local officials who want the building at the long-vacant Tech High, and to a state report that found Tech to be the best site.
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A "fighting on the side of the angels" award to Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley, for ratting out in Congressional hearings home lenders whose "rewrites" don't really give borrowers better odds of paying off their mortgages. Add to that the fact that Coakley has tried to hold the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's feet to the radioactive fire about hot waste stored at the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant and its potential as a terrorist weapon and you see why the AG's name is on our good list.
